Its not everyday you find humor in something that frustrated you… even more challenging is stopping yourself to laugh at it when you are wound up in the other direction.

After a trying afternoon and evening where Emilee and Kaitlyn were challenging the world and each other nearly every five minutes, it was finally time to head upstairs and prepare for blissful sleeping kids. I sent them upstairs to start putting on Jammies and nearly as soon as they arrived upstairs, Kaitlyn started crying.. very hard… so hard she could hardly speak. Slowly I was able to draw out from the two of them that Emilee had gone into Kaitlyn’s room and took Kaitlyn’s seashell. Presumably thinking that she (Emilee) had accidentally left it in Kaitlyn’s room. “OK” I said “this is easy, lets just go get it back. There is no reason to get all wound up and cry hard on this…” which oddly at first, started another round of crying and nearly unintelligible speech.

I had started loosing my patience at this point. and so many time I have told myself that I must be SUPREMELY patient with the kids so that they can learn by example what patience is… But I could not keep myself from being wound up in the moment.

I couldn’t get a strait intelligible answer out of either of them about where the shell was or why they were so wound up about it and so I resorted to shouting “WHERE IS IT!!!” which despite my regrets for shouting, caused them both to immediately point to the hermit crab cage. For all it’s long term issues, shouting’s short term expedience is addicting. Again I thought it would be easy to retrieve the shell from the hermit crab cage and, was it and then on to washing kids… but no.

The Hermit crab had decided that Kaitlyn’s shell was MUCH better than his current and had switched into the new and fancy (if not a bit too large) shell that had been recently been introduced. To her credit, Emilee was offering to wash down the shell after the crab moved shells again, but what crab would want to give up such a fancy shell?

You may think it would end there, but no.

A few days later, Emilee asked if a crab would get out of his shell AND crawl under the coconut husks… I said I suppose so, but asked why; realizing the coconut husk depth in the hermit crab cage was not deep enough to support this theory. Emilee explained the her crab had jumped out of Kaitlyn’s favorite shell and that they pulled it out and scrubbed it down… with toothpaste. Really? Toothpaste? They also said they put it back on Kaitlyn’s dresser, but now it was gone and they couldn’t find it again.

As you may suspect the newly minted shell had crawled away… off the dresser and all the way across the room and all the way under Kaitlyn’s bed. The shell was so big and the crab so small when he was hiding WAY back inside the shell … the girls had thought he had popped out.

now he is safely back in the cage, happily (hopefully) tunneled under the log.